Introducing Lacan: A Graphic Guide

By Darian Leader and Judy Groves

Jacques Lacan is now regarded as a major psychoanalytical theorist alongside Freud and Jung, although recognition has been delayed by fierce arguments over his ideas. Written by a leading Lacanian analyst, "Introducing Lacan" guides the reader through his innovations, including his work on paranoia, his addition of structural linguistics to Freudianism and his ideas on the infant 'mirror phase'. It also traces Lacan's influence in postmodern critical thinking on art, literature, philosophy and feminism. This is the ideal introduction for anyone intrigued by Lacan's ideas but discouraged by the complexity of his writings.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Icon Books
• Release date: Dec 1, 2014
• ISBN: 9781848318793

Book preview

The Surrealist Movement

Lacan took up the study of medicine in 1920 and specialized in psychiatry from 1926. During this period, he was active in the busy Parisian world of the writers, artists and intellectuals who made up the Surrealist movement. He frequented Adrienne Monnier’s bookshop on the Left Bank, along with the likes of André Gide and Paul Claudel and, at the age of seventeen, met James Joyce.

Three years later, I was present at the first public reading of Joyce’s ULYSSES in the legendary bookshop, Shakespeare & Co.

A friend of André Breton and Salvador Dali, he was to become Picasso’s personal physician and a contributor to several Surrealist publications from the early 1930s.

Beginnings in Psychiatry

His internship at St-Anne hospital, starting in 1926, and at the Infirmerie Spéciale des Aliénés de la Préfecture de Police, in 1928, gave Lacan a particular interest in the study of paranoia. Later he would say that …

My only real master in psychiatry was Gaȅtan Gatian de Clérambault.

Lacan singled out his concept of mental automatism. This brought together many seemingly disparate phenomena of madness under the common motif of something being imposed from outside: the echo of thoughts or a commentary on one’s actions, for example.

The form of a particular psychosis would then be determined by how one made sense of these elements which lacked an initial content. Lacan would say that this concept was the closest that contemporary French psychiatry got to a structural analysis, with its emphasis on the imposition of formal elements beyond the conscious control of the subject.

Paranoia

In 1932, Lacan completed his doctoral thesis on paranoia, Paranoid Psychosis and its Relations to the Personality, a study which had a great influence on many of the Surrealists.

I REFERRED TO LACAN’S WORK IN THE FIRST ISSUE OF THE SURREALIST REVIEW, MINOTAURE, IN 1993.(SALVAD OR DALI)

I often contributed to MINOTAURE.

I CHAMPIONED THE POETRY OF THE PATIENT, AIMÉE, THAT LACAN DESCRIBED IN HIS 1932 THESIS.(PAUL ELUARD)

The Case of Aimée

The thesis contains a detailed analysis of a woman, named Aimée after the heroine of one of her unpublished novels, who had attempted to stab a well-known Parisian actress, Huguette Duflos. The case was widely reported in the press at the time, and Lacan tried gradually to piece together the logic behind her apparently irrational act. His thesis introduced a new concept into the psychiatric milieu, that of self-punishment paranoia. Lacan argued that, in striking the actress, Aimée was in fact striking herself: Duflos represented a woman with freedom and social prestige, exactly the sort of woman that Aimée aspired to become.

In her ideas of persecution, it was this figure that she saw as the source of threats to her and her young son. The ideal image was thus both the object of her hate and of her aspiration. Lacan was especially interested here in this complex relation to images and the ideas of identity to be found in paranoia. In her subsequent arrest and confinement, she found the punishment which was a real source of the act itself. She understood, at a certain level, that she was herself the object of punishment.

Lacan’s analysis of the case shows many of the features which would later become central to his work: narcissism, the image, the ideal, and how the personality could extend beyond the limits of the body and be constituted within a complex social network. The actress represented a part of Aimée herself, indicating how the identity of a human being could include elements well outside the biological boundaries of the body. In a sense, Aimée’s identity was literally outside herself.

Analysis

Around the same time that Lacan completed his thesis, he began his analysis with Rudolph Loewenstein, which continued until 1938. Loewenstein had been analysed by Freud’s student Hans Sachs.

FREUD

SACHS

LOEWENSTEIN

I LATER EMIGRATED TO THE USA WHERE I BECAME WELL KNOWN FOR MY WORK IN ESTABLISHING THE PROGRAMME OF EGO PSYCHOLOGY.

Studies in Philosophy

Instead of confining himself to the standard texts in psychiatry and psychoanalysis, Lacan read widely, with a special interest in the philosophic work of Karl Jaspers, G. W. F. Hegel and Martin Heidegger. He attended the seminars on Hegel given by Alexandre Kojève together with many of the thinkers who would leave their mark on French intellectual life, Georges Bataille, Raymond Aron, Pierre Klossowski and Raymond Queneau.

HEGEL HEIDEGGER BATAILLE QUENEAU

Marriage

In 1934, Lacan married Marie-Louise Blondin, the sister of his friend the surgeon Sylvain Blondin. Three children were born from this marriage, Caroline in 1934, Thibaut in 1939 and Sibylle in 1940.

The Marienbad Congress

Lacan made his first intervention at the annual Congress of the International Psychoanalytical Association, held at Marienbad, in 1936. He developed the thesis of the mirror phase.

But my paper was interrupted by the chairman of the session, Ernest Jones, Freud’s biographer.

The original text of this paper is lost, but the brilliant article on the family which Lacan contributed to the Encyclopédie Française in 1938, together with a later version of the paper, presents the argument clearly.

Theory of the Mirror Phase …

Humans are born prematurely. Left to themselves, they would probably die. They are always born too early. They can’t walk or talk at birth: they have a very partial mastery of their motor functions and, at the biological level, they are hardly complete.

I CAN’T PICK THINGS UP OR MOVE TOWARDS OR AWAY FROM THINGS.

So how does the child come to master its relation to its body? How does I it respond to its prematuration?

… and Mimicry

Lacan’s answer is in

Reviews for Introducing Lacan

[p_s_patrick · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

This series of books is heavy on illustrations, and does a good job of explaining complicated ideas while being fun, concise, and accurate. This one on Lacan provides a nice introduction to his some of his psychological theories, but due to the complexity of his ideas it is not quite as easy to follow as some other books in the series, so some sections benefit from re-reading.A lot of Lacan's work was based on extending or refining some of Freud's theories, so some familiarity with these helps a lot. Apart from Freudian stuff, Lacan also had some interesting ideas on Language, so there's really a lot of ideas packed into this short book. Lacan isn't the easiest thinker to get to grips with, but this intoduction does a good job of explaining his theories so that they can be understood by the general reader. Definitely recommended if you want to start learning about Lacan, but for those who haven't read much psychology then Freud would be a better starting place.

[rubya_32 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

This book literally got me through grad school. After days and days of reading sentences of Lacan over and over in the hopes of understanding something, anything- even if it was wrong- this book came and created light out of darkness! Highly recommended to anyone studying Lacan!

[meisterpfriem · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Jacques Lacan (1901-1981) highly influential and hugely controversial French psychoanalyst and psychiatrist. Using methods from structural linguistics and topology he built on and developed further Freudian theory. This text gives a glimpse of Lacan’s ideas, their development over a lifetime and their roots with Freud and in his own clinical practice. Notwithstanding the title much remains obscure. That may be a good thing: over-simplification of complex ideas is no help to understanding. The text comes alive in the graphic images. It is enjoyable to follow even if getting lost at times. If this short outline tempts further study it has achieved its aim. (VIII-10)